Last week, Skechers (SKX) presented at UBS Global Consumer and Retail Conference, giving interesting updates on the status of their business and their expectations for the future. I think its worth refreshing our view of the stock and its attractiveness.

With all the craziness happening in Washington seemingly every hour on the hour the past few weeks, you probably don&s;t know (or have already forgotten) that, as part of the &l;a href=&q;https://www.forbes.com/sites/stancollender/2018/02/09/2018-budget-deal-is-the-start-of-the-new-normal-in-u-s-politics-and-economy/#61f919e114c6&q;&g;big spending deal&l;/a&g; it enacted last month, Congress created a &l;a href=&q;http://thehill.com/policy/finance/375919-mcconnell-schumer-tap-colleagues-to-explore-budget-reform&q; target=&q;_blank&q;&g;new select committee on the budget&l;/a&g;.

As with all of the other nonsensical federal budget commissions, committees and super committees that over the years have crashed and burned (Full disclosure: I was a member of &l;a href=&q;https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/pcscb/&q; target=&q;_blank&q;&g;one of them&l;/a&g;), this latest effort is magically expected to solve our deficit and debt woes and to absolve Congress of its fiscal sins. This new committee of highly partisan politicians is somehow expected to rise above the current intractable partisan politics that are the major reason the federal budget debate is in such a shambles.

&l;p class=&q;tweet_line&q;&g;This new select committee on the budget isn&s;t just utter nonsense, it&s;s an insult to our intelligence.&a;nbsp;We&s;re being told not to look at the big deficit hikes that were just enacted but to pay attention instead to yet another attempt to prevent it from happening again.

There&s;s one big reason why this latest budget super committee will almost certainly suffer the same ignominious fate as all of its predecessors: The Republican House and Senate leadership actually likes the existing congressional budget process, thinks it&s;s working quite well and really doesn&s;t want it to change.

You may be shocked by this. After all the fiscal cliffs, government shutdowns, debt ceiling showdowns, dead-before-arrival presidential budgets, years without a congressional budget resolution, few authorizations, appropriations not done on time and multiple continuing resolutions in the same year to keep the government open, it wouldn&s;t be surprising if you thought Congress actually wanted to fix the supposedly broken budget process.

But you would be utterly wrong. As the past 15 months show clearly, the existing process is absolutely perfect for what the GOP leadership wants and needs.

Think about it.

Last year, the current process allowed the GOP to adopt two budget resolutions so it could use reconciliation to debate its two highest priorities — a repeal of the Affordable Care Act and a tax cut — without having to worry about a Democratic filibuster.

&l;!–donotpaginate–&g;This year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Budget Committee Chairman Steve Womack (R-AR) have both made it clear that neither the Senate nor the House is likely even to consider a budget resolution. That will allow House and Senate Republicans to avoid voting in favor of the trillion dollar annual deficits these budget resolutions would have projected well into the future.

In other words, the existing budget process first enabled congressional Republicans to do what they wanted and then isn&s;t forcing them to do something they want to avoid.

That&s;s doesn&s;t sound like a budget process many Republicans on Capitol Hill will want to change. To the contrary, they&s;re much more likely to want the current process etched in stone than reformed.

On top of everything else, the budget process (as budget process defenders like to say) isn&s;t the real problem. The problem is that Congress and voters like the federal government to spend more on things they want and to tax them less. As the tax and spending bills of the past three months demonstrate, there&s;s an increasingly small minority in the House and Senate interested in actual economic policymaking.

That makes the new super committee charged with changing the budget process a textbook definition of political fraud.

(* I used to refer to the &l;a href=&q;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Commission_on_Fiscal_Responsibility_and_Reform&q; target=&q;_blank&q;&g;Bowles-Simpson commission &l;/a&g;as the &q;BS Commission&q; both because of the names of its co-chairs and because what it did was total BS. This new select committee on the budget is just the latter.)&l;/p&g;

If one is to truly allege that the digital asset is little more than a massive ploy to defraud unwitting investors of their money, la Bernie Madoff, then one must admit that the entire stock market itself is one giant hustle, too.

Last week, Skechers (SKX) presented at UBS Global Consumer and Retail Conference, giving interesting updates on the status of their business and their expectations for the future. I think its worth refreshing our view of the stock and its attractiveness.

In the last few weeks, we have seen two high profile unicorns file for initial public offerings. The first out of the gate was Dropbox (Pending:DBX), a storage solution for a world where gigabyte files are the rule rather than the exception, with a filing on February 23. Following close after,

U.S. stock futures moved sharply higher on Monday, indicating Wall Street may extend gains seen late last week after data showed a strong increase in jobs created, but weaker-than-forecast wages. Dow futures